http://www.wired.com/news/news/email/explode-infobeat/technology/story/17522.html
Speculators Inundate InterNIC
by Chris Oakes
3:00 a.m. 26.Jan.99.PST
Network Solutions has beefed up its staff and infrastructure to cope with
an onslaught of fraudulent name registrations that the company said is
tying up the service.
A small number of malicious groups are spamming the Net's primary
domain-name registrar with phony electronic registration applications. The
activity is effectively doubling the load on the service and thwarting
legitimate attempts by would-be registrants to set aside names as new
Internet addresses.
The point, apparently, is to prevent a legitimate applicant from receiving
a name to sell or to use himself.
"We're dealing with spammers -- we call them speculators -- people trying
to flood our registration services with either bogus or incomplete or
other types of email templates that essentially can clog the registration
system," said Chris Clough, vice president of corporate communications
for Network Solutions (NSOL).
The attacks are a major tie-up for Network Solutions' InterNIC, or
Internet Network Information Center, which handles the addressing system.
Individuals and companies wanting to set aside Internet space make
reservations at InterNIC an average of 10,000 times a day. The fake
applications are doubling that number.
Besides adding more hardware and system support, the company has brought
on an additional 70 people to work with the registration-processing staff.
"It's something that's been going on for a long, long time. It's just that
the volume has increased since the beginning of this year," Clough said.
"[It] became something we had to address because it was being noticed by
would-be registrants."
The company posted a customer advisory late last week after a surge
overloaded the system.
Network Solutions has a monopoly on the registration of the .com, .net,
and .org. domains. The company is slated to share that duty in April 2000,
once plans are in place for opening the domain-name business to
competition.
[snip...]
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